To rant about alcohol and the way it's normalised?

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It's EVERYWHERE and it's poisonous. People normalise it..."Oh...wine o'clock already tra la la!"

And all that shite.

It's responsible for thousands of deaths and injuries and trauma every year and yet it's the first thing people think of when they want to celebrate something.

Get this

3 May 2017: New figures released today show that hospital admissions due to alcohol are at their highest ever levels.

The data, summarised in a release from NHS Digital, shows that alcohol-related hospital admissions in England have increased by 64% over the last decade, with an extra 430,000 people being admitted due to alcohol-related causes in 2015/16 compared with 2005/06.

This takes the total number of alcohol-related hospital admissions to over 1.1 million in 2015/16.

And this

Alcohol is linked to over 60 illnesses and diseases, including heart disease, liver disease and cancer. Figures from the local alcohol profiles for England show that admissions due to liver disease have gone up 57% over the last decade, and that the number of people diagnosed with alcohol-related cancer has increased 8%.

How is this a lovely drink? How is this something that is ok to do in front of children and even to allow children to partake of?

People on MN often say "Oh I let my 12 year old have half a glass of wine...it's a good way to introduce it!"

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO!?

And new research points to the fact that it causes irreversable damage to stem cells, scrambling DNA and eventually causing cancers.

www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/03/alcohol-can-cause-irreversible-genetic-damage-to-stem-cells-says-study?CMP=fb_gu

Think about it. Society is not doing itself any favours.

Doctors, too, don't believe their patients. They're told to double any amount they're told. They don't even believe people who say they are teetotal

A friend of mine went to theirs works doctor and was found to have extremely raised liver enzymes, amongst other symptoms. The drs response was to tell my friend that they must be drinking extremely excessively and the only treatment offered was help to stop drinking. They also reported them to their management as an alcoholic and probably dangerous on the job.
The dr refused to believe that my friend barely drank and refused any other investigations. It was only when they ended up in hospital that a very serious illness was discovered, completely unrelated to alcohol, which could have been fatal if left long enough.

Even when given all records and the diagnosis, the work doc refused to retract their statements to management or amend their records, until they were forced to!

'We are teaching (through the bath time gin, mummy's glass of wine type acceptance) an entire generation of children to deal with their difficult feelings by turning to alcohol.'

I'm not sure this is true, though I'm sure it doesn't help.

But I do agree that children whilst young often aren't allowed to just have their feelings, they are distracted, over-scheduled, problems solved for them without ever giving them a chance to problem-solve themselves. I do believe this can in later life cause use of alcohol (or other substances) as a distraction from inevitable difficult feelings (which of course we all have).

It's having fun over just being.

Also nicer more socially acceptable drinks becoming cheaply and easily available.

“HobbyHorseGO

Alcohol intoxicates you. It makes things funnier, makes you more relaxed so you might dance the night away or laugh the night away. It’s the alcohol that does that.

I dance and laugh without booze.

TBH nights I've had where everyone's been pissed have been incredibly dull.”

ApologIes, I thought it was so very obvious that you could dance and laugh without booze that I didn’t need to point it out.

Maybe your sobriety also makes you state the bleeding obvious?

I'm not sober, I just don't drink very often.

"There certainly wasn’t a culture where people drank at home like this when I was growing up"

When was this? Complete bars with bar stools, counter, and myriad bottles were quite the home decoration staple back in 1970s when I was growing up.

If you don't like it, that's fine. But if there were no good reasons to drink we wouldn't have been doing it as a species for a minimum of ten thousand years."

I've got to argue with this point though - we've been taking drugs and using tobacco for the same amount of time along with a hundred other bad things too....

Also moderate drinkers do not live longer than non drinkers - that's been disproved many times.

Well you're gunna hate me then

There are plenty of other things which are 'normalised' and potentially more harmful for individuals and society than alcohol.

'Work' as an invariably positive, desirable thing, for instance, hence the number of bullshit jobs (completing tasks which are inherently pointless, to generate a profit for someone else).

Private car ownership to the extent that the car-free are stigmatized and constantly nagged to learn how to drive and to buy cars.

Also moderate drinkers do not live longer than non drinkers - that's been disproved many times

they do and it hasn't. A recent massive scale 30 year study showed it yet again.

Here we go....

YANBU..totally agree. The British public have been fooled for years. They have slowly been conditioned to accept that alcohol consumption is normal and anyone who doesnt touch it is weird ,boring or abnormal.

There was a time when pubs had very restricted hours. Now they can open almost for as long as they like. They have made them "family friendly" to get all the family in and condition the children so that they can be the next generation of drinkers.

we have the prosecco surge with so many prosecco bars
We have the gin fad with all sorts of micro distilleries and different flavours
We have various festivals up and down the country,cider,beer ,gin etc

Supermarkets have aisle upon aisle of wine and guess what ? most of it is fake. Fake in the sense that it comes from this that or the other vineyard but in reality, the brands on the bottles mostly dont exist. The supermarkets bulk buy wine then have it bottled into their own invented branded bottles to sell a lifestyle/image to their customers.

A lot of alcohol brands are mostly owned by a couple of big multinationals.

One of the big players is Diageo. The company is worth £66 Billion and its current share price is around £27 .

In 2017 it had revenues of over £18 Billion and profit of around £3.5Billion. It is the 5th largest alcohol company in the world and is UK based. For comparison, one of the biggest global brands Royal Dutch Shell made about £5.6 Billion profit in 2016.

SAB Miller another UK company is the 3rd biggest in the world with annual sales of around USD 20 billion

In at number one spot with annual sales of around $44Billion is InBev of Belgium

As you can see, alcohol is big business.

How much of that flowed to the NHS or the police who spend so much time cleaning up their shite after their customers have fallen into the streets?
They only portray the fun you can have drinking their products, not the cost, the violence, the sickness, the disease , the cancer, the death.

Now im not anti alcohol but as with everything, moderation is the key.

A glass or two of wine a week isnt going to harm anyone and will likely do good,moreso if it is a south american red which has high levels of certain compounds which can have protective properties.

And so i say, be an individual,not a sheep.

And yet despite all that TDH - if you believe it - alcohol consumption is decreasing and no more now than in the 70s.

The British public have been fooled for years. They have slowly been conditioned to accept that alcohol consumption is normal

Nobody has been fooled, or conditioned. Alcohol consumption is normal, and always has been.

Alcohol isn't the problem.

British people's ridiculous attitude to alcohol is the problem.

Most British people binge drink to get pissed. This is exactly the wrong way to do it. If people drank moderately, sensibly and actually enjoyed what they are drinking, instead of swilling down as much as possible as fast as possible, there would be far fewer alcohol related problems.

If you walk round the centre of a French, Spanish or Italian city at 11 o'clock on a Saturday night, you will not see hundreds of pissed-up morons staggering around, vomiting, fighting and copulating with one another.

Some people can enjoy a drink without getting pissed.

Some people can enjoy chocolate or fizzy drinks without becoming obese.

I’m sick of people ramming messages down our throats about alcohol and sugar mainly. When will they learn that this tactic angers most people, as it’s incredibly insulting? I’m not the type to binge on anything, but this type of witch hunt makes me want to binge on prosecco and double decker chocolate bars.

Many chocolate bars and soft drinks I used to enjoy have now been ruined due to the addition of shitty artificial sweeteners. I’m waiting for a time when they start interfering with alcohol in some way.

Yes, there are certain aspects of British drinking culture that are maybe not great, they are not the predominant side, even if the newspapers like to make it appear so. Most drinking is carried out moderately.

Cote I agree. Drinking at home was nowhere near as popular in the 60s & 70s as it is today (those people a PP mentioned with bars in their living rooms were actually a bit weird). Drinking meant going down the pub. Plus spirits were much more expensive. If you asked for (say) a scotch when everyone else was on pints you'd apologise for asking for it.

"If we worked shorter hours and had less stressful/precarious work lives and more positive family activities more sport and clubs and outdoor time then we wouldn’t need to drink so much. "

I agree about stressful lives, but be careful of going to the other extreme as well. Idleness has turned plenty of people to drink.

"'Work' as an invariably positive, desirable thing, for instance, hence the number of bullshit jobs (completing tasks which are inherently pointless, to generate a profit for someone else).

Private car ownership to the extent that the car-free are stigmatized and constantly nagged to learn how to drive and to buy cars."

Excellent points.

"If you walk round the centre of a French, Spanish or Italian city at 11 o'clock on a Saturday night, you will not see hundreds of pissed-up morons staggering around, vomiting, fighting and copulating with one another."

Well, the Spaniards might only be starting at that time.
You're right BUT there has been a growth of binge drinking in some countries. It's called 'le binge drinking' in France and Spain has the 'botellon' where young people pre-drink in the street.
France has very high alcoholism levels as well.

Drinking at home was nowhere near as popular in the 60s & 70s as it is today

Where are you getting this from? Back it up or take it back. It's just a plucked out of the air opinion.

Nothing wrong with alcohol, same as there is nothing wrong with cake. It is guzzling too much that is the problem.

What we need is the attitude that swilling to the point of vomiting or memory loss is disgusting. And , I'm afraid, the great unspoken - that if you are so pissed that you walk into a river or lake and don't come out....that's your fault.

"Moderate drinkers are healthier and live longer than non drinkers. "

This isn't certain. It's possible that stats show this because some of the tee total population includes people who can't drink because they're very ill and/or medication. It could also be that people with little money don't drink and this is what makes them less healthy than the moderate drinkers.
I think it's fine to drink in moderation if it improves your wellbeing, but I'm not convinced of the health benefits.

"Drinking a couple of large glasses of wine most if not all evenings is common and is more than moderate drinking. Most people who do that don’t think they are drinking to excess ime.
Now so people who regularly go out ans polish a bottle or 2 of wine to themselves with a meal."

Government guidelines are well known so I don't really believe that people don't know when they're drinking too much, ESPECIALLY those who drink 2 bottles of wine on their own.

This really narks me.
Yes alcohol destroys lives and kills some people. That's truly awful.

However,most people drink responsibly.
I love a drink. I probably drink a bit more than i should,but still,I feel it's responsible drinking.
The amount of people I see who over eat are shocking.
People I see who eat huge meals plus snacks +++ sugar,pop.
Let's ban crap eh?
People need to take responsibility for what they drink and eat.
It makes me laugh when people comment on drinking when they stuff their faces silly.
I think neither alcohol or sugar should be banned,it's people who should have more self control.